Well this took longer than expected. I was originally going to focus on Wellington's return to the Peninsular and him kicking Soult out of Oporto, but explaining how the French got there in the first place took up so much space we've got a two-parter on our hands.

Honestly, I should start to get away from the Peninsular War- I have no idea where I'm going to get fresh imagery for this.

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War Room 28: 2nd French Invasion of Portugal

Welcome back to the War Room, where we’re going back to the Peninsular War again. We’ve already covered two of my big three Peninsular War events: the Battle of Bussaco and the March to Corunna… the plan for this video was to cover the last one: the Second Battle of Oporto. Setting the scene for how the French actually got to Oporto in the first place has turned out to be lengthy and fascinating enough to deserve its own video, so this is very much a part one: we’ll get to the actual battle next time.

Where were we? French Plans and the State of 2nd Corps

We left the Peninsular War in the north-western Spanish province of Galicia, specifically at the port of Corunna. This is where the British army under Sir John Moore had retreated to after drawing French attention away from their planned operations to complete the conquest of Spain and Portugal.

The French 2nd Corps, under Marshal Jean Soult had pursued the British all the way to the gates of Corunna, but failed to overwhelm them before they could embark on the 18th of January 1809 and escape the peninsula by sea. Napoleon’s hopes of crushing the British were thus dashed and with news of Austria stirring in the east and political intrigue in Paris, the Emperor was forced to cut short his personal involvement in Iberia and head back to France.

Before he went, he left detailed orders for all his marshals, who were to complete the conquest of the peninsula. Before Moore’s intervention, Napoleon had intended to march south-west from Madrid towards Seville and Lisbon. Now that a major part of his armies had been dragged into mountainous Galicia, Soult’s 2nd Corps would tackle Portugal from the north.

The Marshal was to leave Galicia in the hands of Marshal Ney’s 6th corps, which was hot on its heels, and cross into Portugal, taking the country’s second city of Oporto by the 1st of February, 1809, and then the capital Lisbon by the 10th. Even though Napoleon later pushed these dates on by a few days to the 5th and 15th respectively, his timings were somewhat optimistic.

Even more optimistic were his arrangements for coordination between the different French corps in Spain. Upon taking Oporto, Soult was supposed to send word to Mortier and Lapisse who would stage diversionary attacks and apply pressure to the eastern Portuguese frontier in support. This worked in theory… the reality of the French experience in Spain was that the guerrillas infesting the voids between corps made communications unreliable at best and frequently impossible without significant escort.

On paper, Soult’s corps had a strength of about 44,000 in mid-January, consisting of the infantry divisions of Merle, Mermet, Delaborde and Heudelet, supported by the cavalry divisions of Lorges, Lahoussaye and Franceschi.

In reality, pursuing the British through the Galician mountains in the winter had taken as terrible a toll on the French as it had on Moore’s force. Soult had 10,000 men sick and another 8,000 strung out in detachments along the road behind him.

2nd Corps had ditched baggage and artillery pieces on the road behind them to maintain speed in the pursuit, most of the 8000 detached were small units left behind to guard them and bring them up later. In addition them were hundreds of dismounted cavalrymen whose horses had succumbed to the winter weather.

Under other conditions, these detachments would rejoin the bulk of 2nd Corps in short order, but Spanish guerrilla activity rapidly expanded to fill the void left by the passing armies and it soon became impossible for anything but large units to move without being savaged by the armed peasantry.

At the same time, Ney was slow in bringing up his 6th Corps to take over responsibility for the area. Having secured Corunna and Ferrol, the fortress across the bay, Soult could hardly abandon them to the insurgency. In Corunna he had established a hospital for his sick. Ferrol meanwhile was a significant depot for British war material and stores brought in to aid the Spanish which the French gladly took for themselves.

Meanwhile, in Portugal

The defences of Portugal were, meanwhile, only in a marginally better state than they had been when the French occupation force was expelled the previous year.

With a British army in Lisbon and the French turning on their former Spanish allies, the Portuguese Regency had believed it was well shielded from a second French invasion and did little to improve the state of its army.

Napoleon’s crushing defeat of the Spanish and his rapid occupation of Madrid, along with the departure of Sir John Moore and most of the British troops from Portugal, rapidly changed the Regency’s stance, but they had wasted several months they could have made good use of.

The shell of the regular army still existed, but it was politically tainted by association with the surrender and acquiescence of the old regime to the French, as well as being poorly trained and badly equipped. So the Regency fell back onto the Ordenanza- Portugal’s traditional militia.

Ordenanza units were essentially local militia units, focal points for a general mobilisation or levee-en-masse. In the early stages of the Peninsular War they were essentially mobs. There weren’t enough trained officers or firearms to go around, so they were led by popular leaders and principally armed with pikes, existing in a kind of anarchic frenzy.

Oman describes them as:

“Destitute of discipline and of officers, insufficiently supplied with food, the prey of every rumour, true or false, […] they were a source of danger rather than of strength to the realm. […] Orders which they did not understand, or into which a sinister meaning could be read by a suspicious mind, generally caused a riot, and sometimes the assassination of the unfortunate commander whom the Regency had placed over the horde.”

On top of the lack of officers- and a disastrous lack of good officers- the Portuguese army simply didn’t exist as a coherent force. In theory the Regency was in overall command but with a focus on local and regional recruitment and supply, the highest level of command effectively defaulted to the generals of individual districts who were barely inclined to support one another, let alone cooperate.

The main strength of the Portuguese lay in Lisbon. In terms of their own forces, this was simply were the most units were based, but as Soult made his preparations to invade it was also host to 16,000 British troops under Sir John Craddock.

Craddock could have done much to supplement the defence of Portugal- especially as the French advanced further into Spain, menacing Ciudad Rodrigo, Almeida and Alcantara - but he subscribed to the popular view of the time that Portugal was militarily untenable.

Believing that he would inevitably have to fall back on Lisbon and withdraw by sea, Craddock focused on retaining the city as a port of embarkation. He was willing to aid the Regency in maintaining law and order during outbreaks of unruly chaos, but he didn’t dare venture out to threaten any potential French advances.

Defences of Northern Portugal

In other words, between the regional organisation of the Portuguese Army and Craddock’s defensive mindset, Oporto and the north of the country were basically on their own.

In Oporto itself, the Bishop of Oporto was less concerned with the orders of the Regency, of which he was a member, and more concerned with getting back into the position of authority he had seized for himself when the government collapsed in the first French invasion.

Again, Oman paints a great picture:

“… he [the Bishop] often practiced the arts of demagoguery in order to keep firm his influence over the populace. He was all for the system of levee en masse; and summoned together unmanageable bands which he was neither able to equip nor to control. He praised their zeal, was wilfully blind to their frequent excesses, and seldom tried to turn their energies into profitable channels. Indeed, he was so ignorant of military matters himself, that he had no useful orders to give.”

So we have the Bishop building himself his own little power bloc in the north.

Immediately north of him, and aligned with the bishop, was General Feire at Braga who could count on perhaps 25,000 men- almost all of them Ordenanza. They were responsible for the area between Oporto and the border with Spain to the north, which ran along the River Minho.

East of Oporto, operating out of the town of Chaves, was General Silveira with another 12,000 men, plus various other irregulars.

Across the border from him near Monterey was the Spanish Army of Galicia. This was led by La Romana, who had split from the British and plunged into the mountains during the Retreat to Corunna. La Romana’s force was battered and in poor condition, but still about 9000 strong.

Aside from him, there were a few garrisoned towns and fortresses on the Spanish side of the Minho, plus- of course- increasing numbers of guerrillas.

Soult Invades Portugal

It wasn’t until the 30th of January that Soult finally began to move on Northern Portugal. At first, the French made good progress. The coastal road from Corunna was a good one and the Spanish garrisons at Vigo and Tuy quickly surrendered. By the 13th of February, Soult had his entire corps concentrated between Vigo, Tuy and Salvatierra.

From here he intended to keep following the coast road all the way to Oporto, but that meant crossing the Minho. The most direct route would take him to a ferry at Valenza, but this was overlooked by a Portuguese fortress having left his heavy guns behind to ease his passage through the mountains, Soult was ill-equipped to force his way across.

As a result, he looked west towards the area of Campo Sancos near the mouth of the river, a place where his corps could quickly get back to the coast road if they could make a successful crossing.

Unfortunately for Soult, the Minho estuary was dominated by strong currents. Not only was there the force of the Atlantic pushing upstream from seaward, the last few weeks of heavy rain and snowmelt in the mountains had swollen the river and strengthened the downstream current as well.

As a result, there were only a few times a day when it was possible to cross in the motley collection of small fishing boats the French appropriated from the Spanish bank.

Determined to try anyway, Soult made an attempt before dawn on 16th of February. The current was difficult enough to deal with, but as the boats approached the shore they came under fire from Portuguese irregulars on the south bank. In the ensuing chaos, only three of the boats made it, whereupon the 30-40 Frenchmen splashing ashore were quickly taken prisoner. The rest of the small flotilla was scattered down the French bank.

Obviously trying to cross the Minho here was not going to work, so Soult turned his attention back inland. The nearest bridge was all the way over at the town Ourense: a good 120km away.

By now, the Galician insurgency was beginning to take off. The winter weather was clearing and the guerrillas were becoming bolder. Soult found his communications back to Corunna and Ney were cut and his force began to run into ambushes and defended barricades along the roads as they marched on Ourense.

The Marshal quickly realised that his baggage and artillery were going to slow him down to a crawl on the terrible roads and become a liability in the face of increasing resistance, so he sent them back to Tuy.

That left him with only three batteries of light 3pdr guns and the ammunition carried on the Corp’s limited pack horses and mules, amounting to 3000 shots worth for artillery and 500,000 cartridges for the infantry. On the plus side, the French could now move much quicker and the faster moving light artillery would be less of a juicy target for guerrilla attacks that would drain the infantry’s ammunition. The downside was that if they got bogged down and couldn’t resupply themselves with captured cartridges, there was a real risk they might have to abandon the whole expedition or risk running out.

Despite this, Soult entered Ourense on the 20th of February, finding it undefended and its bridge over the Minho intact. After 9 days in the town concentrating his corps and collecting supplies, he set off again towards Monterey and Chaves.

This was not the most obvious route to Oporto: that lay west, down the Limia valley to Vianna and then back onto the coastal road. But Soult had learnt of La Romana’s presence near Monterey. If he went west, the Army of Galicia would be in his rear and any setback on the road to Oporto would rapidly turn into a disaster.

By advancing via Monterey, Soult would be able to smash through La Romana’s battered army and hopefully neutralise it for at least the duration of his advance on Oporto.

As it happened, La Romana was in the process of leaving as 2nd Corps bore down on him, as Oman relates:

“Down to the last moment the Marquis [la Romana] had been giving his intention of retiring into Portugal and co-operating with General Silveria, the commandant of the Tras-os-Montes, in the defence of Chaves and the line of the Tamega.”

“But he was on very strained terms with his ally, who showed no great alacrity to receive the Spaniards across the frontier: his troops had been quarrelling with the Portuguese, and he was very reluctant to expose his half-rallied battalions to the ordeal of battle, which Silveira openly courted.”

In short, la Romana had not been able to agree on terms for cooperation with General Silveira’s force at Chaves and began to withdraw east through the mountains towards Puebla de Senabria on the same day that Soult left Ourense.

The main body of the Spanish was already well away by the time Francheschi’s dragoons caught the 1200 men of the Spanish rearguard. These they quickly dispersed, killing 300 and capturing 400, but the Army of Galicia as a whole remained intact on 2nd Corp’s flank.

Oporto

They were out of the picture for the time being though, leaving Soult to occupy Monterey on the 9th of March, not far from General Silviera’s 12,000 men at Chaves.

Neither Silveira’s force nor Chaves itself were really in a position to stand and fight against the French. Only half of the Portuguese had firearms, all but a handful of them were ordenanza and militia. Chaves was a fortified town, but its walls had never been repaired after being breached by the Spanish fifty years earlier and the artillery on top had been so poorly maintained it was borderline useless.

There were more Portuguese troops to the west, at Braga, Oporto and scattered around the neighbouring districts, but according to Oman:

“… none of these masses of armed men were sent to the aid of Silveira. He was not one of the bishop’s faction, nor was he on good terms with his colleague Freire. Neither of them showed any inclination to combine with him, and their followers, in the true spirit of provincial particularism, thought of nothing but defending their own hearths and homes, and left the Tras-os-Montes to take care of itself.”

Silveria rapidly came to the conclusion that it was foolish to stand his ground. Despite being unwilling to cooperate with la Romana, he had probably appreciated having a Spanish army in between him and the French. Now that they were gone, he decided he could not afford to become trapped in Chaves, where his small force would inevitably be destroyed, and he fell back past the town to a position on the hills overlooking it.

3000 of his men refused to obey his orders and remained to hold the town, along with another thousand or so armed citizens. Soult came up on the 10th and surrounded them, though they remained defiant until the next day when Delaborde and Lahoussaye forced Silveira off the heights. Upon seeing this, the mob inside Chaves swung from rabid optimism to a loss of hope and surrendered.

Soult occupied the town, taking advantage of the opportunity to appropriate more supplies and bring his sick and baggage down from Monterey. Again, he had a choice of two routes for continuing on to Oporto.

He could move south towards Villa Real, then along the Duoro to the city. Or he could go west towards Braga and descend on Oporto from there. His cavalry revealed that the road to Villa Real was defended- this was the direction that Silveira had disengaged in- while the passes on the route to Braga were not.

So 2nd Corps left Chaves on March 14th, taking the path of least resistance towards Braga. There was little formalised resistance in the valleys, but plenty of irregulars willing to fight. One of Soult’s aide de camps wrote:

“Even the smallest villages tried to defend themselves. It was not rare to see a peasant barricade himself all alone in his house and fire from the windows on our men, till his door was battered in and he met his death on our bayonets.”

“The Portuguese defended themselves with desperation, and never asked for quarter: if only these brave and devoted fellows had possessed competent leaders, we should been forced to give up the expedition, or else we should never have got out of the country.”

“But their resistance was individual: each man died defending his hamlet or his home, and a single battalion of our advanced guard easily cleared the way for us.”

“[…] While the columns were on the march isolated peasants kept up a continual dropping fire on us from inaccessible crags above the road: at night they attacked our sentries, or crept down close to our bivouacs to shoot at the men who sat around the blaze.”

“This sort of war was not very deadly, but infinitely fatiguing: there not a moment of the day or night when we had not to be upon the qui vive [the lookout]. Moreover, every man who strayed from the ranks, whether he was sick, drunk, tired, or merely a marauder, was cut off and massacred. The peasants not only murdered them, but tortured them in the most horrid fashion before putting them to death.”

By the 17th, Soult’s cavalry vanguard reached the village of Carvahlo d’Este. This was only six miles east of Braga and General Friere had concentrated a force about 25,000 on the high ground beyond the village to block the French advance. By now, having left garrisons along his route, Soult’s force had been reduced to 23,500 men. Although he was confident of victory against the poorly armed, undisciplined mass ahead of him, he also wanted to wait for his entire force to come up and hit them with overwhelming strength.

It took another three days for the French to concentrate, during which time the Portuguese underwent a change of management.

Having failed to contest the narrower, more easily defensible passes further west, General Freire became increasingly reluctant to stand and fight at Carvahlo d’Este. Falling back on the more numerous troops and fortifications of Oporto seemed like a much better idea.

Unfortunately for him, the tension of waiting as the French concentrated in front of them was driving the mob he commanded to ever higher pitches of frenzy. He tried to keep his plans to disengage secret, but they were discovered and Freire was taken prisoner by his men as he tried to slink away to Braga.

He was usurped by one Baron Eben, a Prussian officer in command of some Portuguese regulars and very much in the Bishop’s camp. Eben whipped up the mob, had Freire thrown in prison in Braga for treachery and allowed some ordenanza to drag him out into the street and murder him as soon as his back was turned.

Eben made efforts to fortify and reinforce the Portuguese positions on the heights, but obviously all the discord had not done much to boost their chances against Soult’s veterans.

On the 20th the French advanced across the board and the mass of militia disintegrated at the point of contact, fleeing down towards Braga or scattered into the mountains. The French lost about 200 men, the Portuguese 4000, Soult’s men being disinclined to take prisoners after having suffered through so much guerrilla activity.

According to one French officer:

“The commencement was a fight, the end a butchery… if our enemies had been better armed and less ignorant of the art of war, they might have made us pay dearly for our victory. But for lack of muskets they were half of them armed with pikes only: they could not manoeuvre in the least. How was such a mob to resist us?”

That victory took Soult to Braga, where he stayed for three days before turning south and approaching Oporto on the 27th. Here he found more resistance than he had expected.

The city sits on the River Douro, mostly on the northern bank which slopes down to the riverside from a line of hills. These had been hurriedly fortified by the citizenry over the last few months. The bishop had assembled about 30,000 men to defend the city: 5000 regulars, 15,000 militia, 9000 armed citizens and 1000 artillerymen servicing 197 guns, principally defending the line of redoubts on the hills.

After leaving Heudelet’s Division to secure his wounded, sick and baggage in Braga, Soult only had 16,000 men to hand, including 3000 cavalry. Despite that, he attacked on the morning 29th of March in classic Napoleonic fashion.

Throwing Merle and Delaborde’s divisions at the left and right wings of the defences respectively, he waited until he saw the Portuguese weaken their centre to support their flanks and then unleashed Mermet’s Division straight up the middle.

This collapsed the Portuguese centre, rendering the two wings untenable and the entire defence broke, the militia fleeing down into the city. Fearing the inevitable terror of a sack, most of the population came with them. This resulted in a tragedy. There was only one bridge over the Douro to the safety of the south bank: a pontoon bridge with a section that could be raised and lowered to allow river traffic to pass.

It’s not clear whether this section was raised to prevent a French pursuit or part of the bridge collapsed under the sheer weight of people trying to cross, but there was a terrible crush and hundreds of deaths, not helped by a unit of Portuguese cavalry which rode over the crowd in its drive to escape.

The leading French pursuers fired on the press until they realised what was happening and started to help, but they were a minority. The rest of Soult’s men found a city at their mercy and, although they engaged in some street-fighting against diehards and holdouts that had been unable to escape, they set about sacking Oporto with all the usual horrors.

By evening the city was firmly under French control.

Soult in Oporto

So, Marshal Soult had achieved the first of his objectives set by the Emperor. The fact that he was six weeks behind the imposed schedule was the least of his problems.

Much like Junot in the first French invasion, he was entirely out of communication with other French forces and the wider world. In the words of one of Soult’s officers:

“The march of the 2nd Corps may be compared to the progress of a ship on the high seas: she cleaves the waves, but they close behind her, and in a few moments all trace of her passage has disappeared.”

In essence, the French controlled the ground they stood on and Portuguese and Spanish irregulars filled the voids they left when they moved on. Soult got almost all of his news from letters and other documents captured in Oporto and Braga. From these he learnt that the garrisons he had left behind were in trouble: north of the Minho, Tuy and Vigo were under siege, the small force he had left in Chaves had already been destroyed by a resurgent Silveira. There was no news of the other French movements planned to support an advance on Lisbon, nor any word of Ney’s 6th Corps back in Galicia that might cooperate or at least help secure his lines of communication.

The Marshal set about rectifying the situation and seeking out more news, but the sheer volume of Portuguese militia infesting the north of the country presented difficulties, as Oman puts it:

“When the whole country is up in arms, as it was in Galicia and northern Portugal in the spring of 1809, it is useless to dispatch small bodies of men in search of news. They are annihilated in a few hours: but to make large detachments and send them out on long expeditions, so weakens the main army that it loses its power of further advance.”

Soult sent forces out to the north, to relieve Tuy and Vigo, to the east to try and get news of or link up with Lapisse, who was supposed to be menacing the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, while screening Oporto against what remained of the Bishops army, now holding the line of Vouga about 50km to the south.

Neither of the division-sized expeditions brought back good news. Vigo had fallen to a combined effort by Spanish guerrillas and the Royal Navy. Some brief, fortuitous contact with a probing brigade from 6th Corps revealed that Ney was far too busy dealing with the Galician insurgents to help. Hearing this, Soult abandoned Tuy and brought his forces in the north down to Oporto.

To the east, there was no word of Lapisse, who had abandoned any attempt to assist the 2nd Corps, but Soult’s men did encounter Silveira again. He had moved up from Villa Real and retaken Chaves only a few days after 2nd Corp’s main body had left and was now collecting increasing numbers of militia and stragglers at Amarante- ultimately about 10,000 men.

The French quickly smashed his force on the north bank, but falling back through the town they managed to hold onto the bridge over the Tamega there. The French would eventually storm that too and scatter the army, but Silveira had successfully soaked up the attention of 9000 of Soult’s 21,000 men until the 2nd of May.

Any further pursuit- and any chances of pressing further west in search of contact with Lapisse- were soon curtailed. Not only were the ordenanza closer to Oporto becoming increasingly bold and active with so many French troops fixed over at Amarante, but Soult had received word of British activity to the south.

Conclusion

That’s something we’ll deal with in the next episode with the Second Battle of Oporto.

Soult’s invasion is a classic example of a conventional force struggling against an unconventional one. The French won every time Spanish or Portuguese irregulars made a stand: 2nd Corps advanced to Oporto on the back of victory after victory. But while the guerrillas, ordenanza and militia never won any battles, they were not ever truly defeated either. It was all too easy for them to disperse into the mountains and reform once the enemy had passed and to keep them under constant pressure with ceaseless minor or even individual actions.

This in turn made it impossible for Soult to actually get anything done once he had taken Oporto. The city was not a poisoned chalice by any means, but it certainly wasn’t the secure foothold the Marshal needed as a jumping off point to attack his Lisbon. Just like the Portuguese presence forced Soult to send out large detachments that sapped the strength of his main body, Oporto would have required a large garrison had he decided to move on and he would be facing the much more significant resistance in the south with a dangerously depleted force.

The reality is that Soult simply didn’t have the manpower to hold down what he had conquered thus far, never mind enough to keep going towards Lisbon. This is a persistent problem for the French all the way through the Peninsula War: Iberia soaks French troops up like a sponge, without providing an army to defeat or a point to hold that will precipitate some kind of ultimate victory.

So, hope you all enjoyed this video. Wellington’s counterattack is up next, until them if you’d like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.